Royal Opera Arcade, London

Shopping opportunity

The Royal Opera Arcade, tucked away next to what is now Her Majesty’s Theatre, between Pall Mall and Charles II Street in central London, is Britain’s oldest shopping arcade. It was designed in 1815, as a passage roofed with a vault and lit by circular skylights, by John Nash and George Repton. Along one side run 18 shops, each with a neat, projecting quadrant-cornered window – very fashionable in this period. Each shop has a basement and a mezzanine floor inside but these are small shops and the whole development is compact – the walkway is less than 4 metres wide. This was England’s first arcade of this type and the design is influenced more by the Parisian arcades than by English precedents such as the long-vanished ‘Exchanges’ of the 17th century. Although few later architects copied Nash and Repton’s lovely vaults and domes, the overall layout set the style for this kind of exclusive, covered shopping development, and others, such as the famous Burlington Arcade off Piccadilly, soon followed.

Arcades along these lines evolved as developers saw the opportunity to woo shoppers off city streets – which were muddy, noisy, crowded, and often dangerous – into a drier, cleaner, more protected environment. In an arcade, well-to-do Regency and Victorian shoppers did not get their clothes* spattered with mud and stood less chance of losing their money or portable possessions to Oliver Twist and his predecessors. In the little shops in an arcade they could expect to find small, luxury items – jewellery perhaps, exquisite glassware, pens and equipment for the gentleman’s study, upmarket gifts and costly knickknacks. From the 18th century onwards shopping was for the middle and upper classes increasingly a form of recreation, and places like Nash’s Royal Opera Arcade provided a comfortable setting in which this leisure activity could take place. Fifty years on, though, the arcade was less successful, perhaps because shoppers were more attracted to the area around Piccadilly. Henry Mayhew, in his The Shops and Companies of London (1865), described it as “the Arcade of the Melancholy-Mad Bootmakers”. Nowadays it has rediscovered some of its early glamour, and details of the current shops can be found here.

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* For women's fashions in 1821, just a few years after the arcade opened, look here.